Monday, January 23, 2012

American Diocletian; Obama and Energy

Timothy Birdnow

After three years of study http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204468004577168912332364268.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h President Obama has determined that there has not been enough time to thoroughly research the Keystone XL pipeline - and he has killed the deal. What is interesting about this is that the President did not afford Congress as much as one year to study the government takeover of healthcare in the U.s. (which hijacked one seventh of the U.S. economy), demanding immediate passage and prompting then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to say of the gargantuan bill "we'll have to pass it to see what's in it." Why didn't Mr. Obama employ the same standards to Keystone?

Keystone would have brought oil from Canadian tar sands to the U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast. Oil pipelines are very well-established technologies, much safer than rail for transporting large amounts. Keystone would have been funded entirely by private concerns, and would have guaranteed a steady flow of oil to the U.S. The Canadians are now considering a pipeline to the British Columbia coast to sell the oil to the Chinese instead.

President Obama's own jobs council (handpicked by the President himself) has advocated pipelines and alternative oil sources, suggesting he "policies that facilitate the safe, thoughtful and timely development of pipeline, transmission and distribution projects," and warning that a failure to do so"would stall the engine that could become a prime driver of U.S. jobs and growth in the decades ahead."

But the pipeline could move more than just Canadian oil; North Dakota has become a major oil producer, and at present that oil can only be moved by railroad. The Canadian pipeline would give ND a way to move that oil to the Gulf refineries cheaply and easily. Interestingly enough, one of the big rail companies that profit from the present arrangement is BNSF, which is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, presided over by none other than Warren Buffet, a major advisor and contributor to Barack Hussein Obama.

The Trans-Alaska pipeline was built in just over three years, and had Obama authorized Keystone oil would be flowing by now. Certainly such a pipeline would be easier to build in the developed portions of the country.

The President through Interior Secretary Ken Salazaar, has also banned mining for uranium on over a million acres of federally-owned land in Arizona. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204124204577154332224006536.html?mod=ITP_opinion_2

Now, nuclear produces no greenhouse gases, and is completely safe in newer reactors. This President kills the Keystone pipeline and bans uranium mining. He closed down offshore drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and refused to reopen it even in the face of a court order, and when he finally did reopen it he had saw to it that a morass of paperwork slowed the restarting of drilling. As a result, many of the oil rigs moved to South America where they are making large sums of money for Brazil's Petrobras, in which his heavy contributor George Soros owns a large stake. He wants to put over 32 coal fired electric plants out of business with new draconian regulations, shutting down 8% of all U.S. generating capabilities. http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/01/up-next-obamas-new-energy-regulations-will-put-32-coal-plants-out-of-business/

Energy usage is a measure of wealth; the U.S. uses more energy per person than any other country on Earth, and the Left has hated America for it. President Obama wants to equalize the world's wealth, return the wealth America has "stolen" to it's "rightful owners" by hogtie via regulation. I would argue that Obama wants more than just to equalize things, to offer fairness. I assert the man wants to punish America, make America suffer. I am of the opinion that Barack Obama has an actual hatred for America, passed to him by his mother, his neighbor the Marxist poet Frank Marshall Davis, by his friends Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, by Jeremiah Wright. I would argue his Islamic experiences in Indonesia taught him that America is evil, and should be brought down. I would suggest that Mr. Obama knows our tenderest spot, our wallets, and is hurting us where we are vulnerable. He would love to get re-elected so as to continue his mischief, but wants even more to permanently damage the country.

In another time he would have long since been impeached. He has committed several flagrant violations of the law, including refusing to enforce voter discrimination laws, using U.S. funds to promote abortion overseas, refusing to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, disobeying a court order to restart Gulf drilling, giving firearms to Mexican drug lords to sew chaos and thus establish the need for gun control in the U.S., moving control of the Census Bureau directly to the White House, attempting to seize control of the internet in violation of a court order, etc.

In fact, there are no less than 50 potential impeachment counts that could be made against the current occupant of Pennsylvania Avenue. http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/26650

The expectations were high for Obama, America's first "black President" (although he has a white mother and likely his father was half arab making him one quarter black) and Congress is terrified of impeaching him, making it appear they are a lynch mob of rednecks from rural Alabama. Also, the GOP impeached the last "black President" who was also the last Democrat in office, and the old Boy Who Cried Wolf syndrome comes into play; they just can't impeach without looking ridiculous. So Obama continues his destructive rampage, much like one of the tripods from Wells' novel War of the Worlds. I doubt we can recover from the damage he has already done, and should he be re-elected (and expect massive vote fraud and manipulation in the next election) America will be crossing that fine line that the Romans unwittingly crossed in 476 a.d. The Roman people did not understand that Rome had fallen; all seemed as it had been. But historians date that to the elevation of the German Odoacer to the throne, ending the Latin line. It was not one dramatic moment. Future historians will date the fall of the American empire in much the same way; probably with the election of Barack Obama, or with his re-election. Even if Obama leaves office the damage he has done may be irreversible; we cannot pay down the gargantuan debt he has accumulated in his tenure of office.

American power stemmed not from America's military might or from her control of resources but from her resourcefullness in utilizing what was given to her. Jules Verne observed that Americans were born engineers; put an American in a room with some cogs and springs and whatnot and leave him for ten minutes and when you return you would find he had assembled some contraption, according to Verne (in From the Earth to the Moon). Americans could take sub-par land and make it bloom. Where the Spanish could never settle Texas in any meaningful way, and neither could Mexico, the Americans made it into one of our greatest states. The land itself is poor, the harbors treacherous and silty, the aboriginal peoples were hostile, the water bad. But Americans made it bloom through their resourceful character, and energy was no small part of the equation. This has always been the case; as pioneers expanded Westward they invented new ways of living, new tools, new ideas. No wood for fences? Make them out of wire. Add sharp little barbs, since wire fences won't keep your cattle from pushing through otherwise. No water for your crops? Build a dam, drill a well. No access to market? Build a railroad. During the War of 1812 the American land forces were an embarassment (despite fighting on home territory) but the Navy embarassed the British, who had the best naval force in the world at that time. Why? Because America had developed new and better ships, more manueverable and capable, which did much damage both in the Great Lakes and off the coast in the Atlantic.

And, of course, America pioneered the use of electricity. Edison's light bulb was a vast improvement over the old carbon arc electic lights, and a huge improvement over any other lighting system (such as the kerosene lamp). The Aladdin lamp, a kerosene lamp using a rare-earth mantle to produce much more light, came out about the same time as the Edison light bulb. They are now largely novelties. And while telegraphs were under development for a long time before Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail, it was their version of the machine that revolutionized long-range communications. http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Electrical_telegraph and it was an American - Cyrus West Field - who hatched up the then-hairbrained scheme of running a telegraph line clear across the Atlantic Ocean.

Alexander Graham Bell was, of course, the inventor of the telephone.

Suffice it to say that America's genius lay in her ability to make due with what she has. And America is virtually swimming in oil, gas, and coal. Energy is the key to American greatness and always has been. We have found ways to harness rivers, to use coal-fired steam engines, to build internal combustion machines.

What Obama is doing by attacking our energy usage is nothing short of attacking the roots of American greatness. American technical aptitude stems from America's freedoms; only a free people can experiment, can develop, can create. The two go hand in hand. Cut America off from energy and America withers. I fear that Barack Obama may understand this better than most, and I suspect he wants to see some withering, a cutting down to size.

Serfdom was not born during the Middle Ages; it was born during the late Roman times. The Emperor Diocletian, concerned that the Empire was losing her farmers and artisans, issued edicts forcing the workers to stay on their properties and in their occupations. If your father was a farmer you had to be one. The ebb of imperial authority only advanced that trend, because the farmers and artisans required protection from local wealthy citizens once the protections of the Roman legion were gone, and they had only one way to pay the local rich guy. As a result, fealty became a way of life, and the poorer farmers and artisans became bound to their land or their blacksmith shops or their pottery wheels. America seems to be heading in that same direction; we are not bound to farms or smithys, but to our ethnic and social groups, our political castes. Government is gobbling up the sources of our freedoms, taking away our ability to move, to communicate, to innovate. Obama, by stealing our energy supply, is making us serfs to the government, which provides for us the things that we would provide ourselves if allowed to do so. By economic deprivation we are forced to go hat-in-hand to Uncle Sam, who caused the deprivation to begin with by tying up the resources needed to create.